Social psychological research on race and prejudice has focussed on the nature and structure of stereotypes and prejudicial predispositions and attitudes. The present proposal deals with two topics which have heretofore received little research attention. The first area of research concerns the role of cognitive processes involved in encoding information about other persons or about social groups, and examines ways in which biases in those processes may facilitate the development and maintenance of differential conceptions of blacks and whites. The second area of research concerns sources of psychological discomfort experienced by whites in interracial interaction, and how this affective experience may result in a white person's differential response to black and white others in a first encounter.